Undeterred by the SNP’s agonies, the Scottish Greens have now decided to jump into the row about post-Scexit pensions. The indy-backing party, which props up Nicola Sturgeon’s government at Holyrood, has come out claiming that nervy Scots need not worry about their pensions being paid if the country voters for secession, according to one of its leading lights at the Scottish parliament.
A not-so magnificent seven currently take the party whip up in Edinburgh; among them is Ross Greer, the charisma vacuum best known for hoping for the death of the-then critically ill Margaret Thatcher, for calling Churchill ‘a white supremacist mass murderer and declaring that ‘nothing would thrill me more than for Buckingham Palace to burn to the ground.’ In a party led by Patrick Harvie, to be known as ‘the stupid one’ is quite the accomplishment.
Greer appeared on (what else?) another podcast where – surprise, surprise – he suggested that the rest of the UK would, for reasons unknown, continue to pay Scottish pensioners’ benefits if the country quit the Union. He told Untribal:
No matter what the Scottish government will make sure that people’s pensions are being paid. My preference would be that they are paid in part by contributions made by the UK government. No matter what, they will be paid though.
Note the lack of any actual justification for how the Scottish government will continue to pay such pensions or logic for why a foreign government should make ‘contributions’ like the Weimar reparations. Greer, though, had stumbled on a brilliant analogy, so original that *only* he could have thought of it. There was, he insisted, a historical parallel for Scexit – the US Civil War. Greer claimed that:
There’s a really interesting example in relation to pensions though, and in no other sense, I should stress I am comparing our independence debate with the American Civil War. But I think that is an interesting example of how pensions can do strange things. The Confederacy, the losing side of the Civil War lost and were destroyed in 1865. The last widowers’ pension for a Confederate service personnel was paid out in 2012 so the Union government, the United States’ government, who won the US Civil War paid the pensions of Confederate soldiers, who’d been on the losing side of that war, whose state, the Confederate States of America, had been destroyed.
The winning side continued to pay those pensions and because it was the pensions that were then passed onto those people’s successors, it was paid long time after the lifetimes of anyone who had been involved in the US Civil War. So I think that hopefully is an interesting example of how this isn’t a straightforward thing, pensions are not straightforward of “Your state pays them and if your state doesn’t exist it doesn’t pay them and another state has to start paying them.” It’s more complicated than that.
Greer has of course conveniently overlooked the fact that the humiliated and broken Confederacy rejoined the Union, just four years after it seceded. His analogy would only work if the Confederacy had continued to exist after the Civil War which, of course, it didn’t.
The reason why the United States’ government continued to pay the pensions of former Confederate soldiers for decades afterwards was because these men became United States’ citizens once more. And in 1869 in the Texas v White ruling the Supreme Court declared that secession had not taken place and so-called Confederate states had always remained in the Union and had instead been engaging in armed rebellion.
Turns out Ross, history might be a bit more complicated than you think. Elsewhere on the same podcast, he also claimed that Scots should be taught how to spot fake news and misinformation ahead of another independence referendum. Fact-checking the nationalists’ pension claims might be a good place to start.
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